Fake Monsters
by Mrs. Abject
Summary: Ini tries to adjust to her new life, starting with reacting appropriately to a local creature sighting. Oneshot, pre 2-2, spoileriffic.


**Fake Monsters  
**  
Rating: K+  
Warnings: Mentions of death, massive spoilers for 2-2, obnoxious attempts to link 2-2 and 1-4, kind of a serious tone for something about people with silly names.  
Disclaimer: I don't own the Ace Attorney series, except for copies of the games blah blah blah. I don't even have a copy of Apollo Justice, which makes me own it even less than not owning it at all.  
A/N: This is my first attempt to write anything for Phoenix Wright, so hopefully it's passable. I was planning on writing some thoroughly awkward Miego, but I got into an argument with someone on the internet about whether Mimi was a tolerable character... or something, we didn't seem to agree exactly on who was arguing which side, but it made me want to write about Mimi, so I did. I checked the timeline on Court Records for whether it was possible for her to have gotten in on the Gourdy fad, and it looks like it was, but just barely. Feedback would be nice. ((8/15- edited because messed up the formatting and put the title at the end. Now fixed.))  
"Ini" is referred to as Ini in the summary so as not to spoil.

* * *

"Oh my god!" squealed one of the friends. "Did you hear? Did you hear?" Mimi smiled, tried to pull her face up into that expression her sister always used to have when she was excited or interested or just particularly silly at the moment. Maybe there were differences to it depending on what more specific emotion Ini had been feeling, rather than just being in a mood that was generally… Ini herself, when she was alive, had been the best way of describing it. Sometimes, Mimi had felt like she was reaching for straws when trying to explain her sister, and now that she needed to go even further and _be_ her sister, it hadn't gotten any easier. Ini had always been a bit unpredictable, but she wished she'd paid more attention back then, because Ini (the real Ini) had known these people, too. Could they tell something was different, whether it was that tiny bit of height Mimi had on her sister when she stood up all the way straight, or that Mimi had a few freckles in her eyes that were missing on Ini, or that maybe something in the way she acted was just a little bit off, enough for them to tell?

"What is it?" Mimi replied in her sister's sweet little perky voice…wait, she didn't do the 'like' thing, Ini _always_ did the 'like' thing, at least as far as Mimi remembered. "Like, I didn't hear anything." She put on a goofy grin. There, maybe it was better now. Her patience with herself was already starting to run thin, which meant she had to be acting at least a little like the little airhead she was trying to imitate.

"Oh, come on!" another friend says. "Don't tell me the word 'Gourdy' means nothing to you?" Mimi can't remember the girl's name, but she should have. This is her friend, maybe even her best friend. _Ini's_ friend. It's the same thing now. (her friend by inheritance?) _Gourdy_… the word did mean something to her—it made her cringe. She hadn't completed her science requirements back in nursing school to believe a creature that big could live in a lake that small without anyone noticing up until now.

Mimi reminded herself quickly, before she could slip back into those old patterns of identity, that she was wrong. No, she hadn't completed her science requirements, or gone to nursing school. She was studying the occult now… and _god_, what a _stupid_ thing to go to school for! She would never be able to find a job with it, or do anything other than ramble about Bigfoot and ghosts and whatever other ridiculous things Ini liked... Maybe she could change majors a little later on, once she had been "interested in the paranormal" for as long as she could take. But maybe not. Maybe somebody would suspect it.

She couldn't help wonder if she was doing enough, talking how Ini talked, dressing how Ini dressed—it was a good thing Ini didn't like revealing clothes, what with the burn scars and all, because she wouldn't have known how to shop for Ini. She wore what was already there in Ini's room (which had been in a steadily growing pile on the floor, _contagious_, instead of in the closet and dresser like how Mimi had done things), but she couldn't have picked something out at a store that her sister would have liked. There had been a line with Ini, a line that she would get obnoxiously close to, but never tacky enough to cross. Mimi had a hard time seeing it then, and she has a hard time seeing it now, because Ini would go so far into the realm of bad taste, like with that horrible hat she liked to wear. But other people didn't seem to see the line either—their mother and father, especially, who had loved Ini but hadn't understood her any more than Mimi did—so there really was no need to worry about going too far with the act. People would catch on if she wasn't Ini enough. She needed to pretend that a line existed, but she could draw it wherever she wanted.

Ini _could _quit paranormal studies, grow up a little and stop talking like that. People would think it was survivor's guilt, or following in her sister's footsteps (although like hell she'd be a nurse again) or maybe just a delayed case of maturity and normalcy. No. Who was Mimi kidding? That wouldn't happen. She didn't have the option of being Mimi anymore, and that included Mimi's interests, and goals, and even her ideas about the world (since when was skepticism about things like _Gourdy_ a belief?) but she wouldn't be the kind of person Mimi was, either, the kind of person who screwed up again and again and again… no, there was no reason to think about it. Ini was happy, stress-free. That would have to be good enough.

"Gourdy?" she said. "Nah, that, like, doesn't even ring a bell." She gave herself a fake little knock on the head, like Ini used to do from time to time when she felt like being self-deprecating in the obnoxiously cute sort of way. "But, I mean… you know, like, I just got out of the hospital, right?" It was an awful excuse, but it was the kind of excuse you'd hear from someone who… wasn't very intelligent, and in this kind of situation, Mimi had to lay it on thick. The friends had come to see her in the hospital, but she had been in pain and wrapped in bandages and dosed up on morphine. She wouldn't have had to play the role very well then; hell, she could have yelled for the entire wing to hear that her name was Mimi Miney, and everyone would have just thought she was in pain and she didn't know what she was talking about, poor thing. But now, if something was off enough, they'd know.

"But it was on the news _yesterday_," the friend said. "Come on, you're being such a space cadet, Ini!" Mimi froze for a second, just _knowing_ that the friend suspected and that this suspicion would lead to another, and another, until she was found out… but the friend laughed, and the tone she spoke in was lighthearted. Mimi sighed, relieved. No, what would Ini have to be relieved about? Keep up the act, Mimi, keep it up.

"Well, then, come on, like, tell me!" Mimi giggled back at the friend.

Ini's friend proceeded to do just that. Gourdy was "this huge monster living in Gourd Lake all this time!" It had a long neck and made a sound like a pop, and this had to be a bad dream because Mimi couldn't imagine people believing that this thing actually existed. Even Ini, who ate this stuff right up, might not think this was real—she could remember Ini calling one of these things a fake before. Or maybe Ini didn't think the thing was a fake, but she brought up the possibility. Mimi really should have paid attention better.

Well, Ini today was going to believe in Gourdy wholeheartedly.

"Oh my god!" said Mimi. "Really? That's, like, so amazing! I wish I could have seen it…" Maybe she was laying it on too thickly with the ditzy way her sister used to talk. Maybe she wasn't laying it on thickly enough. Either way, Mimi had the sense that the real Ini made a much better Ini than she did.

* * *

There was only one decently good picture that had both of the sisters in it. Their mother had taken it when Mimi had first graduated nursing school, and somehow Ini had to flutter her way into the picture, too. She looked just like the sister that Mimi remembered, but really she had just started dyeing her hair that hideous orange color (and she'd never quite been able to get the box into the garbage can, when she was done with it, either. Funny how it turned out, how otherwise Mimi would never have known which brand or shade to use if she hadn't had to see it on the sink or on the floor so many times), and she was wearing that eyesore-blue dress with all the butterflies, and that silly, ditzy grin slapped on her face.

Most of Mimi's hair had been burnt away in the crash, but when it grew back in, nobody knew she hadn't been dyeing it before. And the butterfly dress… well, if there was any bright side she could see, the dress wasn't an option anymore. Maybe the doctors had gotten Mimi's face to look like a mirror image of her sister's, and her arms to look more or less okay, but wearing things that showed off her legs wasn't an option anymore, not without more surgery.

Mimi was smiling, too, but Ini, Ini was the happy one. Mimi remembered the moment, and yes, she was glad she graduated, but she wasn't thinking about how glad she was, she was concentrated on the stress of the moment and how she really didn't want to get her picture taken, even if everyone was smiling and happy and wanting her to. And her sister's dress. She could remember cringing at that dress, loud and blue and stupid. And she was tired, too. She was always pretty tired, even then. Ini never had to worry about anything. She didn't understand the meaning of hard work, or sacrifice, and she'd have never made it under the pressure of working for Dr. Grey. He'd probably have her running home in tears sometime during the first week—maybe even the first day. But Ini didn't seek out those things, and for some reason, Mimi had been jealous of it.

She supposed it fit the way she and her sister got along that the last time she talked to the real Ini, she barely remembered it. Ini and her friends had been waiting for her after work at the clinic, leaning on her car and chattering, getting their handprints on the bright red paint job and not even caring about it… Mimi couldn't help but remember the patients, instead. It was easier to think about handprints on her car, but she never would have gotten into this mess if she hadn't _killed_ those people, even if it wasn't her fault. If she'd just been able to keep it in that day, if nobody had… passed away, if she hadn't spent every spare minute in the break room bawling her eyes out and hoping, hoping they wouldn't find her out, hoping Grey would own up to what happened (because it was hisfault, really, once justified the right way) Maybe they'd just blame someone else instead, even though in a way it didn't matter if they blamed Mimi or Grey or the patients themselves, it was her fault those people died.

So Mimi had fixed her makeup, shrugged off Grey's constant stream of criticism more than she ever had before, changed out of her nurse's uniform, and (somehow, after a day like that) made her way out to the car, and there were her sister and her sister's friends, getting handprints on the car and chattering and somehow making it so much worse. She was harsher than she really wanted to be, but she'd shooed away the friends, and gotten her sister away and into the car. Ini was waving goodbye to them in her Ini sort of way, and they were off.

The rest of it was fuzzy at best. Ini had started out talking about some haunted house that someone vaguely linked to her through numerous degrees of separation had visited once, and Mimi, for the most part, tuned it out. At one point, she started to cry, and that's where the memory became more flashes of conversation, defined mostly by the knowledge of what would come after. Ini knew Mimi wasn't okay. Mimi explained as much as she could without really telling her sister anything. Ini offered to drive, and Mimi didn't really remember why, but she didn't let her. Something about the car, yes, it was a new car, but maybe Mimi just didn't have enough energy to think it over. Ini was saying something sympathetic, and Mimi would probably always wonder what exactly it was, because she really couldn't remember anything clearly besides how she'd been telling herself not to fall asleep, and then asking herself not to fall asleep, and then begging herself not to fall asleep. And then perhaps she thought it was okay to just close her eyes for a moment or two if it would help her concentrate, but she couldn't clearly remember that, either.

But _after_… she remembered the pain, the fire, reaching for the door and being unable to help her sister, and she remembered the surgery and the physical therapy and the way the pain for that had been even worse. It was Grey's fault. It wasn't her fault. Ini died, and for a space cadet she really hadn't been that bad after all… no. She reminded herself to stick to the story. It was Mimi who died, Mimi who caused this to happen. It was okay to have the photo. Nobody would fault her for having a photo of her dead sister, even if they'd be wrong about which sister exactly she was mourning. It was nothing that would make anyone suspect her. But it pulled something in her heart the wrong way, looking at the person she used to be, the person who took her own sister's life, even if she was tired, no, _drugged_, because it _really_ was Grey's fault. It had to be. Still, she didn't want to be Mimi anymore. Mimi… she was easier to be, what with the things she liked and the way she thought and talked, but Mimi was a dead end. Mimi was… not a good person. And now, she had another chance.

She didn't remember exactly when she gave the doctors that photo of her sister to reconstruct her face, either. Yes, it happened, and it was another thing that she really didn't want to think about, but it seemed more natural if she couldn't remember actually making the choice. She was Ini, now. Maybe a little silly, maybe a little stupid, and maybe focused too much on things that really didn't matter, but she was a decent human being, and someone Mimi should probably have appreciated more when Mimi had been around. It didn't matter now.

Ini's friends called again, with new developments on the Gourdy case. She was still trying to figure out if these people actually believed in Gourdy or even if they actually cared about Gourdy, or if they were just trying to go along with her and find her something to be happy about, now that she was covered in burn scars and her sister was dead. She didn't think about Gourdy any more than she had to, but she thought about him (it?) enough to have at least a basic knowledge of the facts. That was what Ini would do, after all. Gourdy had shown up only for a second or so, but from the photo in the tabloid newspaper, it looked something like the Loch Ness monster. She'd at least heard of Nessie, maybe not even from Ini. She watched the news when it came on, hoping to hear more details and reports and scary stories about something that, to put it kindly, couldn't possibly exist. She looked up all the theories online about Gourdy and Nessie and any of the possible explanations for them, and she even thought about going to the park herself to put on a show of looking for Gourdy (would that have crossed Ini's invisible line?), but her legs still hurt too much to walk all the way, and she couldn't even open the door of her mother's car, let alone drive to the park. Maybe it was a good thing she wasn't Mimi anymore—Mimi loved to drive. But Ini loved things like… what was the word, cryptozoology? Things like whatever this was. If she wanted to be Ini, or even to just not be Mimi anymore, it was time to get used to it.

* * *

Maybe it was two or three days later when Ini approached her friends with a well-rehearsed goofy smile, and by the expression on their faces, she could tell they had some bad news to give her. Maybe it was even four days. She used to have a great sense of time, but after the hospital, after the pain and medication and days spent doing nothing but sleep, and more days spent doing nothing but try to sleep, she had lost her touch.

"Iniiiiiii!" one of them whined. "They… they disproved Gourdy!"

"Really?" Ini replied. "That's, like, so unfair! I really liked him! I mean, you hear about this sort of thing happening… I don't know, like, places really far away, but Gourdy was right here!" She didn't feel any more like herself, but the charade wasn't so clunky and odd anymore. There was a sort of rhythm to being Ini… at least _her_ version of Ini, who probably was a bit more predictable than the original. It would get better. She hated this sort of thing now, but give it some time… she would grow into it, she hoped. There was almost a level of satisfaction in her, to hear Gourdy was a fake all along, although she hoped he would have lasted a little bit longer, just so she wouldn't have to jump up and research demonic possession this time. Of course Gourdy wasn't real, such a big monster in a small lake. Ini's sister had taken a lot of science courses, but even though Ini herself wasn't really good at science, she still could tell Gourdy was impossible (and yes, thinking this sort of thing in an overly intentional manner would help it feel natural someday, even if now it was only _totally_ awkward). Gourdy was… well, if more of these things started to be fake, she'd be able to deal with it better. Ini was confident, even if she was forgetting that Mimi always was the confident one. She could do this, she could start again…

"Some idiot blew up an air canister, or something," said her friend, and then of course went on to describe the convoluted circumstances that led people to think there was a Gourdy. Ini smiled and nodded along. One thing being mistaken for another? Nobody would have guessed it.


End file.
